maths

Coding’s Back in Town – Let’s Use it to Inspire Maths

  For me utilising coding in mathematics lessons started in my first school job. I was asked, “as a maths person can you code?” “Yes” was my response and off I went. I began by teaching students how to write retro-games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man as… Read More

Maths – Enrichment Games

Maths is fun to many anyway but you can make it even more fun and develop a deeper understanding of the processes involved by introducing more fun and practical activities. There are many ways to introduce fun activities and here, we share six of our favourites. Activity One: Function Steps… Read More

The Magical Number Seven

  Newcastle University hosted the ‘Numbers Festival’ from 27th June to 5th July 2015 in a variety of venues in and around Newcastle. The main aim for the festival was to promote… Read More

Maths – Scaling up

Some tasks can be mind-numbingly tedious but sometimes have to be done. Here, we pose some questions that the more curious pupils might ask and set about answering them in an easy and roughly accurate way. Activity: Scaling Up Suitable for: Year 3 to Year 6 Learning… Read More

The Neighbour Problem

  Take a deck of cards and ask someone to shuffle it thoroughly. With the deck face down, ask them to name any two cards they think might be next to each other, not worrying about which suit, just the name/number. Before you take a look, ask them… Read More

Maths – Multiplying and dividing

When I was young and first learning about multiplication, I was told to think of multiplication as ‘sets of’ items or numbers. Whilst this approach has lost a little of its appeal these days, the principle is useful in another way of doing division. Activity: Dividing Using Grids… Read More

Maths – Statistics

If you were to try to find out the statistics for how many people like strawberries in the UK, it would be very difficult, it not impossible, to ask everyone and publish the results. Because of the difficulties, market researchers use a process called ‘sampling’. Using this process they ask… Read More

What is your favourite number and why?

  As part of the celebrations for its 50th Anniversary, the IMA, in collaboration with the University of Manchester, ran the first ever UK Festival of Mathematics in June 2014. This event was a great success and was well attended by school groups, mathematicians in academia and industry,… Read More

Maths – In My Life

It will come as a surprise to us all how much time in our lives we spend doing mundane things. In this activity the pupils will estimate how much time they spend doing a regular activity in a day and then scale it up to see how much time they… Read More